SOURCE: "The Tempest," in New York Times Book Review, June 22, 1997, p. 8.

[In the following review, Bailey asserts that Junger "man-ages with considerable reporting skill to conjure up [the crew's] last hours," but complains that "Not all of Junger's information is vital to his task."]

For several hundred years men have been going out from Gloucester, Mass., to fish in near and distant waters, and not all have come home: some 10,000 Gloucestermen have died at sea since 1650. Even today, commercial fishing is one of the most dangerous occupations in this country that men—and now women—can take up. In The Perfect Storm, which chronicles the havoc caused by a monster gale off the coast of New England in 1991, Sebastian Junger tells us that, per capita, more people are killed working on fishing boats than in any other job in the United States. It's safer to parachute into forest...